Paul J. Kosmin is Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History at Harvard University and the award-winning author of The Land of the Elephant Kings and Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire.
Without Paul Kosmin’s meticulous investigation of what Seleucus
achieved in creating his calendar without end we would never have
been able to comprehend the traces of it that appear in late
antiquity…A magisterial contribution to this hitherto obscure but
clearly important restructuring of time in the ancient
Mediterranean world.
*New York Review of Books*
Tells the story of how the Seleucid Empire revolutionized
chronology by picking a Year One and counting from there, rather
than starting a new count, as other states did, each time a new
monarch was crowned…Fascinating.
*Harper’s*
In 305 BCE, Seleucus I, Alexander’s successor as the ruler of a
multiethnic and multilingual empire in Asia, introduced a new era.
The new dating system was intended to make the king master of time.
It ultimately transformed the historical consciousness of the
empire’s populations, triggered the nostalgic desire to keep the
memory of a pre-Seleucid past, and shaped expectations of the
future. With erudition, theoretical sophistication, and meticulous
discussion of the sources, Paul Kosmin sheds new light on the
meaning of time, memory, and identity in a multicultural
setting.
*Angelos Chaniotis, author of Age of Conquests*
Kosmin’s richly-textured book brings home the dramatic newness and
deep reach of Seleucid temporal symbolism and demonstrates the
close interweaving of spatial and temporal imaginations. This bold,
interdisciplinary analysis of indigenous responses to the Seleucid
‘time regime’ provides tools that will facilitate dialogue and
collaboration across fields of classical, biblical, and ancient
Near Eastern and Mediterranean studies.
*Anathea Portier-Young, author of Apocalypse against
Empire*
Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire demonstrates not
only what can be done with often obscure and difficult sources in
several ancient languages, but also what needs to be done if we are
to make real progress in our understanding of the Hellenistic
world. What we have here is not just another study of the Seleucid
Empire but a new model for how to study the history of the ancient
world in our global present.
*Johannes Haubold, author of Greece and Mesopotamia*
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